JWW: Uh-huh.
SOPHIE: In or out of film, I don’t like it.
JWW: Anything else?
SOPHIE: Not really. Oh, any time my partner is a turn-off. Body odor, for example. Or do you know what’s worse? Scenes where you have to kiss someone with bad breath. Also facial acne on a partner turns me off. This is a matter of being turned off by a partner rather than by an act.
JWW: Uh-huh. Do you ever think about how your parents would react? For that matter, do your parents know what you’ve been doing?
SOPHIE: Let’s not fucking talk about my fucking parents, if you don’t mind.
JWW: I’m sorry, I—
SOPHIE: No, I’m sorry. I don’t know why I blew up like that. But let’s not talk about them.
JWW: Sure.
SOPHIE: Is there anything else you want to know?
JWW: Let me just think. I had some notes of things to ask but I don’t know where the fuck I put them.
SOPHIE: Oh.
JWW: Let’s see. Uh, what kind of a future do you see for yourself in films?
SOPHIE: I think I have a good future.
JWW: In porn films, do you mean?
SOPHIE: No, there’s no future in porn films because there’s no money in porn films. But I’ve discovered I really like film itself as a medium to work in. I think I prefer it to the stage, for example.
JWW: So you hope to get work in legitimate films.
SOPHIE: Don’t you think I’m good enough?
JWW: I didn’t say that. I just wondered if you see porn films as a logical stepping-stone to other film work.
SOPHIE: Not for most people.
JWW: Oh.
SOPHIE: Because they can’t act worth shit. If all you can do is suck cock, then you’re more or less limited to roles in which cock sucking plays a leading part.
JWW: Not to mention any names.
SOPHIE: I wasn’t even specifically thinking of her, actually. But generally, most of these girls are not actresses, they don’t even have heavy acting ambitions, whereas I consider myself to be an actress first.
JWW: And a cocksucker second?
SOPHIE: (laughs) Okay, I’ll buy that. An actress first and a cocksucker second. You know what they can do? When I die they can carve it on my tombstone. “She was an actress first and a cocksucker second.”
JWW: “And a beautiful human being in her own right.”
SOPHIE: Amen.
Afterword
I can explain.
And I think I’d better.
Let me begin by telling you, Gentle Reader, that the book you just read, the script and production diary of the 1970s film Different Strokes, is nothing but a pack of lies. No such film was ever produced, and all the engaging characters, the acts they perform and the sparkling conversations they conduct, are wholly fictitious, the products of the fertile if warped imagination of one person.
Uh, that would be me.
I could leave it at that, but in this instance there’s a story that goes with it, and it’s arguably as good as the one you just read. Maybe better.
In the early 70s I was living with my three daughters and my then-wife in a Revolutionary-era farmhouse on fourteen rolling acres in New Jersey, just across the river from New Hope, Pennsylvania. I had a pied-a-terre in New York as well; I came to town once a week to play cards, see friends, and get into trouble, and spent longer stretches at the apartment when I had a book to write.
A founding member of our weekly poker game, and a friend since college, was Jim Fenton. He’d gone the corporate route, and worked for years for either American Can or Continental Can; later he moved to Pepsico, spent most of his time in the Far East, and stayed there after he left Pepsi’s employ. (I’ve tried without success to track him; Google’s no help, throwing up endless references to a prominent English poet with the same name. If anyone reads this and knows how to reach Antioch’s Jim Fenton, please let me know.)
This was around the time when films like Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones were appearing in theaters all over America. The flickering black-and-white images of Elks Club smokers were going mainstream, with good production values and big audiences. And Jim reported that a guy he knew, a businessman kind of a guy, wanted to make a porn film with a real script and a good cast and wide distribution. The guy, whom I’ll call Vincent Riordan, had already hooked up with a director, whom I’ll call Claude Borgward, and the next thing they needed was a writer. Would I be interested?
I met with Riordan and Borgward, and we worked out some sort of a deal. If I remember correctly (and I don’t see why I should) I was to get $1000 for writing the script, plus “points” in the production; if it made money, I’d make money.
Jim would get points, too, in return for raising money for the production. I have no idea what its putative budget may have been, but I know Jim was selling shares for $1000 apiece, and several people at Dell wanted in.
Yes, that would be Dell Books. My publishers.
Here’s how that happened. While I wasn’t going to be getting much actual cash for my efforts, and while I didn’t have a lot of faith that my points were going to make me rich, I saw an opportunity for some subsidiary income. As John Warren Wells, the name I intended to use on the script, I had published several books with Dell, including The Wife-Swap Report, Wide Open: The New Marriage, Three is not a Crowd, Sex Without Strings, and Beyond Group Sex. So why not sell Dell on the idea of publishing the script, along with a production diary from the film, interviews with the leading actors, and a few stills from the film itself, carefully chosen to slip past the censors?
I sat down with Bill Grose, my editor at Dell, and pitched the proposal. He loved it, and brought in Peggy Roth, and before I knew it they’d both expressed eagerness not only to publish the book but to invest in the production. I know Bill and Peggy both bought shares, and I believe there were a couple of other investors at Dell as well. I gave all the checks to Jim Fenton, and he tucked them into an escrow account.
And my agent made my deal with Dell. We signed a contract, and I was to get an advance of $7500 for writing the book. (Plus royalties, to go with my points in the film. Right.)
I had a couple of meetings with the two principals. I didn’t really get to know Vincent Riordan, who struck me as rather a slick character, but saw more of Claude Borgward, who in fact played a couple of times in our weekly poker game. On the first such occasion, he volunteered to host the game, and we played at a long refectory table in his Upper West Side apartment, in a room lined with bookcases. He had a pet margay, a small wildcat rather like an ocelot, and the creature hung out on the bookshelves and prowled around gazing balefully down upon the table.
This was unsettling, and made no less so by the room’s all-pervasive pong. One’s nostrils left one in no doubt that one was in the presence of a wild denizen of the jungle. So that was the last time we had the game at Claude’s place. But the next week we played at somebody else’s apartment, and Claude came, and we realized we’d been remiss in assessing blame for the stench. It wasn’t the margay that ponged. It was Claude.
Never mind. Somehow, at home or in the city, I got a screenplay written, and I believe it was pretty much the version you just read.